Its worse than I thought. Frogs are cut open, skinned and have their snouts and rear legs cut off with scissors or a blade while still alive. It seems the primary reason for this is because freshness is perceived as important for taste, although I couldn’t find much information. Truly horrifying indeed.
“Freshness” being perceived as important for taste is definitely true in China. In some wet markets in China, frog vendors try to skin the frogs first and keep the head intact, and only cut the heads off when a customer verifies that that frog is alive, and then buys the frog.
(You might already be aware but I think that website you linked is just LLM-generated articles. They’re quite difficult to avoid on search engines these days. The information might still be accurate of course.)
I was not aware. Thank you for flagging that. I just did some more research and I’m not able to find more credible information about why they are not killed first. I’m glad @Fai was able to corroborate “freshness” being a driver in the Chinese context but it’s now unclear to me why they are not killed first for European imports.
Its worse than I thought. Frogs are cut open, skinned and have their snouts and rear legs cut off with scissors or a blade while still alive. It seems the primary reason for this is because freshness is perceived as important for taste, although I couldn’t find much information. Truly horrifying indeed.
“Freshness” being perceived as important for taste is definitely true in China. In some wet markets in China, frog vendors try to skin the frogs first and keep the head intact, and only cut the heads off when a customer verifies that that frog is alive, and then buys the frog.
(You might already be aware but I think that website you linked is just LLM-generated articles. They’re quite difficult to avoid on search engines these days. The information might still be accurate of course.)
I was not aware. Thank you for flagging that. I just did some more research and I’m not able to find more credible information about why they are not killed first. I’m glad @Fai was able to corroborate “freshness” being a driver in the Chinese context but it’s now unclear to me why they are not killed first for European imports.